Jimmy Eugene Johnson III, left, is on trial this week on charges of capital murder in connection with the May 2018 strangulation death of transgender woman Carla Flores-Pavon.

 

BREAKING UPDATE: Jurors in the trial of Jimmy Eugene Johnson III have convicted Johnson of capital murder in connection with the 2018 death by strangulation of Dallas transgender woman Carla Flores-Pavon.  According to Claire Couch, media and community relations manager for the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, the jury deliberated for only 14 minutes before returning with a guilty verdict,

Couch said that Johnson, who chose not to take the stand in his trial, receives an automatic sentence of life without parole.

 

ORIGINAL POST: Jurors are expected to begin deliberations sometime today (Thursday, Aug. 18) in the trial of Jimmy Eugene Johnson III, 28, who is facing a charge of capital murder in connection with the May, 2018, strangulation death of transgender woman Carla Flores-Pavon, also known as Carla Patricia Jones.

Flores-Pavon was found in critical condition in her North Dallas apartment on May 9, 2018. She was taken to a hospital where she later died.

Johnson was arrested eight days later, on May 17, after being stopped on a traffic violation near Huntsville. He was arrested and charged in Flores-Pavon’s death after officers found items belonging to the dead woman in his car. Dallas police said Johnson and Flores-Pavon initially met in a chat room. Even though the victim was transgender, police said at the time they believed the murder was part of a robbery and was not a hate crime.

Jury selection in Johnson’s trial happened on Monday, Aug. 14, and prosecutors began presenting their case on Tuesday, Aug. 14, according to Phillip Clark, deputy chief of the Dallas County Criminal District Attorney’s Office, and the DA office’s LGBTQ liaison.

Clarke said that Johnson conducted the jury selection process himself on Monday after invoking his right to represent himself. However, the following day, after the prosecution had presented its opening statement and it was time for the defense’s opening statement, Johnson “asked to have his attorneys reappointed or reinstated,” Clark said. “They were and are back on the case.”

Clark also noted that even though defense attorneys “elicited agreement from [a specific witness] that the victim and the witness were ‘biological males,’” defense attorneys otherwise had made “explicit efforts to be respectful of the victim and at least one witness [Tuesday], in terms of their statuses as transgender women.” That is, he said, a marked difference from the behavior of the defense attorney in the 2019 trial of Edward Thomas, the man convicted of assaulting trans woman Muhlaysia Booker in the parking lot of a South Dallas apartment complex a month before Booker was murdered.

— Tammye Nash